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In 1947, casting the backward glance of a recent expatriate, Richard Wright observes in an interview, "To be American in the United States means to be white, protestant, and very rich. This excludes almost entirely black people and anyone else who can be easily identified" ("I Feel" 126; emphasis added). In the United States, Wright suggests, such things as citizenship are determined to a large extent through the subject's-more precisely, his or her body's-relation to specularity; questions of authori ty and disenfranchisement in American society relate to the ways in which the subject is located within the regimes of (in)visibility.
In her recent book devoted to uncovering the Western economies of visibility, Robyn Wiegman proposes what seems very much like a reiteration of Wright's argument:
Modern citizenship functions as a disproportionate system in which the universalism ascribed to certain bodies (white, male, propertied) is protected and subtended by the infinite particularity assigned to others (black, female, unpropertied) .... this system is itself contingent on certain visual relations, where only those particularities associated with the Other are, quite literally, seen .... (6)
Similarly, in her influential essay "National Brands/National Body," Lauren Berlant argues that, in the United States, corporeality and citizenship (and its consequent rights) seem to be incompatible with one another. ". . . white male privilege," she writes, "has been veiled by the rhetoric of the bodiless citizen, the generic 'person' whose political identity is a priori precisely because it is, in theory, non-corporeal." Unable to approximate the "ideal model of bodily abstraction. . . American women and African-Americans have never had the privilege to suppress the body" (Berlant 112-13). Wiegman agrees with this: "The white male [is] 'freed' from the corporeality that might otherwise impede his insertion into the larger body of national identity," whereas, for the African-American male, "the imposition of an extreme corporeality . . . define[s] his distance from the privileged ranks of citizenry" (94).
In this paper, I propose to delineate the specificities of the African-American "place" in the field of vision by turning to two of Richard Wright's texts, his 1940 novel Native Son and his 1938 short story "Fire and Cloud." What becomes explicit from the comparison between Wright's hugely influential debut novel and the much less...